You are swapping a bit of additional kernel code for quite a bit ofoverhead at every program's runtime.

Yes, you want to keep your code small and tidy, but getdents calls arefrequent and the wasted cycles spent on the memory operations faroutweigh the extra code. In many cases we have to clear a 8k+ bufferjust because getdents fills in 200 bytes.

Plus, the old code, like all compatibility interface, can over time begrouped together and moved to one side of the kernel so that they don'tdisturb the icache.